The Presence in Absences: A Conversation with Gina Chung

I first met Gina Chung at a going-away party for a mutual writer friend. In a warm back room, during the final days of summer, I wedged myself into a small circle and caught the final bits of something Chung said. She paused to clue me into their conversation. I was struck by her kindness and easy generosity, the way she openly shared her writing routine and practices with a group of old friends and new acquaintances. Months later, I heard about her debut novel, Sea Change (Vintage). The book sucked me into its effervescent, marbled world and ultimately buoyed my spirit, just like its author had at that summer party.

Sea Change follows Ro, an Asian American woman who is floating into her thirties on her own. Partly struggling, partly aimless, Ro is estranged from her mother, and grieving her father, who disappeared on a sea exhibition a decade earlier. Ro’s only companion is a Giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, the last remaining link to her father. As Dolores is about to be sold to a private investor, Ro has to reframe her understanding of past and present to make sense of her new world. Chung’s prose bubbles with delectable humor and metaphors, burrows into hard truths, and sets out to explore uncharted emotional ranges.

Chung is the recipient of the 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and a number of literary awards, including a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and the Rumpus, among others. She has a forthcoming short story collection, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024).

I spoke with Chung about Sea Change over Zoom a few weeks before her book launch. We talked about the role of silence and the unsaid in Asian American families, humor’s proximity to grief, subverting conventionality in character tropes, and how to take care of oneself in service of one’s art.

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The Rumpus: I noticed that a lot of your work, Sea Change and a number of your short stories, often features the natural world. What drew you to ocean life and sea creatures as subjects and counterpoints to the characters in your novel?

Gina Chung: I’ve always loved writing about the natural world and thinking about animals that live in different ecosystems than us because it reminds me that we as human beings are also animals. I think we often forget that about ourselves; it’s really easy for us to see ourselves as being somehow apart from or above nature when in actuality we are very much a part of it. Whereas humans can and often do lie about what we need, animals can’t hide or be dishonest about their needs. Thinking about animals and what they need to survive and thrive inspires me as a writer to also try to be more honest on the page.

Rumpus: Within the characters’ environment, money is an oceanic force, capitalism as much a precondition to existence in the novel as it is in current modern life. With our protagonist, Ro, it seems there are few things that she can do in opposition to these forces, but she actively defies, withdraws from, and avoids this system in her own ways. Can withdrawal and avoidance be a form of agency?

Chung: In a lot of ways, withdrawing from or avoiding a decision can seem like a way to surrender one’s agency in a situation, but at the same time—my therapist and I always talk about this—not making a choice is still kind of making a choice as well. For Ro, avoidance is a huge part of how she navigates her day-to-day life because she’s been hurt and carries a lot of pain. That makes her feel afraid to engage directly with things that might hurt her or that she might be in disagreement with. When it comes to the impending sale of Dolores, it is one area where, even if she’s not consciously doing anything to fight back against the sale, she feels a direct kind of no in response. I wanted that to be an inciting incident for the book, too, because it gets her to understand how much this octopus means to her and how much she stands to lose if she were to lose this one point of connection.

Rumpus: This inciting incident also pits her against her best friend, Yoonhee. I was fascinated by their relationship. They grew up together with similar backgrounds but end up in very different positions at the aquarium and have different levels of motivation to rise the ranks. Why was it important for you to juxtapose their ambition and upward mobility?

Chung: I loved the idea of, as you said, pitting them a little bit against each other with this development that happens in their workplace. I wanted Yoonhee to feel like a character who has genuinely been a part of Ro’s life for a long time. They’ve seen each other through different ups and downs and phases of life since childhood. I’m always fascinated by the topic of friendship, in particular, old friendship. What does it mean to have old friends who have been with you for many years and who have been witness to all the different past selves that you’ve inhabited? It’s such a gift, but it can also be such a challenge because when you are friends with someone for that long, you both start to feel a little bit of ownership over past versions of one another. People change and grow over time. Friends can grow apart. They can also come back together.

I wanted Yoonhee to feel a bit like a foil to Ro but be a real person herself, too, as someone who has such a completely different outlook in life. She’s someone who is pretty straightforward, knows what she wants, and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Just because she tends to be more conventional doesn’t mean that she’s a flat or two-dimensional character. I also wanted to examine what happens in a person’s life when they get to a certain age and feel like, “Oh, my gosh! Everyone is leaving me behind.” Because they’re so close, Ro can’t help but look at Yoonhee and feel, even if she doesn’t necessarily want the same things that Yoonhee wants, that she should want them and that she’s nowhere near getting them.

Rumpus: Craft-wise, how do you write someone who might fall into some of these tropes but also honor their individuality?

Chung: One thing I wanted was to have them interacting and bickering over small things—the way you do with siblings, old friends, or anyone you’ve known for years—and just see the ways in which they are both able to call each other out. That’s what really felt like the core of Yoonhee to me, this person who deeply cares about her friend. Sometimes there’s no other way of expressing it than, “Why are you this way?” in this exasperated but also deeply loving way. I also wanted to show, with the flashback sections of earlier versions of themselves, how vulnerable Yoonhee is. Just because she seems to have her life together doesn’t mean she doesn’t experience pain or doubt or fear.

Rumpus: Through flashbacks, the book alternates a lot between the past and present. How did you kind of conceive of this structure? I felt very taken care of as a reader to get into the story in this way.

Chung: I’m so glad to hear that. I love an alternating structure in a book, and there are so many books that do this amazingly well. One that was particularly close to my heart at the time of writing was Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which is also a later-in-life coming-of-age story, against a backdrop of family dysfunction that shows how she’s gotten to this point in her life. In that book, those scenes from the main character’s childhood and upbringing really helped me as a reader anchor the choices she was making in the present day. I wanted to do something similar with Ro: give the reader a vivid picture of not only who this person is today and how she is navigating the world but also what has led her to this point, including her parents’ choices. In those past sections, I especially wanted to excavate who Ro’s father was, since he’s not around in the present day of the novel. I wanted to give the reader a chance to get to know who he was and what he meant to Ro.

Rumpus: As you mentioned, the men in Ro’s life, her father and also her ex-boyfriend, are a bit more phantom than flesh. They are bigger figures in her head through her memories than they are in the present. They exist through their absences. What did you want to portray about absences and the stories we conjure about the people who are no longer in our lives?

Chung: You’re so right in saying that a person’s absence, once they’re no longer in our lives, can almost become stronger than their presence was back when they were around. There’s a kind of danger in that, since the person who is mourning might get caught up in imagining that things were better than they actually were with that person. Maybe they think that in losing that person, they’ve lost some irretrievable part of themselves too. With Ro, the book starts off with her having gone through this breakup with her boyfriend, who is leaving her for a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. As anyone who has ever been through a breakup knows, the things that you didn’t quite appreciate about that person when you were together seem to come back in full relief when they’re no longer in your life. That’s what she’s going through, in the process of mourning that relationship, and also the loss of her father, who was hugely influential in how she sees the world. Her father introduced her to this love for animals that they both share, and he encouraged her to be curious about the world. His absence is so clearly felt throughout her later adulthood. I wanted to show just how searing that kind of loss can be and how in the process of mourning someone, whether it’s because you broke up with them or because they’re literally gone and you will never be able to connect with them again, the mourning is never linear. Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t remember or grieve the ones we’ve lost, but I wanted to explore what can happen if you get too caught up in that mourning.

Rumpus: I feel like silence, too, is more of a presence than an absence, in the way it pervades relationships between family, friends, and romantic partners in the novel. Silence feels particularly pertinent in my own Asian American community, especially in how it persists in the first generation and is continuing to manifest in other ways in future generations. What roles did you hope for silence to inhabit for the characters in the book?

Chung: I feel that so deeply. The silences of ancestors, the silences of our parents and grandparents, as well as the silences that we inherit as children of immigrants. It’s hard to ask folks about the past because there’s a lot of pain within those memories. It’s definitely something that I’ve noticed a lot in my own family. In many Asian and Asian American families, there’s an acute awareness of what it would cost for the other person to relive their story just by telling it. That’s something I’m always thinking about and living with. I don’t want to perpetuate the trope of the silent, sad Asian American family either, but I do think that silence exists for a good reason, and a lot of those reasons are bound up in pain and trauma. With Ro, I think we see it most with her mother because she and her mother have never been able to talk about things like her father’s disappearance. They’ve never really been able to process what they’ve both experienced and been through. In writing Ro, I wanted to investigate what it would be like to grow up with that silence and not even know how to broach it with your mom, your friends, or even yourself. Ro doesn’t have the language to name any of the feelings that she’s grown up experiencing.

Rumpus: One of my favorite passages in the novel is: “I used to wonder if we would take better care of our bodies if our skin was transparent, if every little thing we did and said and ate was observable. If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body.” It’s interesting how everyone has their own version or perception of self-care, especially when we consider the juxtaposition between what we think we need and what others think we need. Could we talk about your intention with writing about self-care?

Chung: Ro is not very good at taking care of herself throughout most of the book. I think taking care of yourself—and I mean real care, not just the commodified ideas of self-care that we’re all sold nowadays—is actually very difficult, and it’s a practice. As someone who also struggles at times to take care of myself, I wanted to explore a character who has never really learned how to do this, and this is something I feel like I haven’t really seen much of in contemporary literature when it comes to portrayals of Asian American women and women of color. There is a sort of larger cultural moment right now around what I’ve seen some people refer to as “the disaster woman trope,” but I feel like those characters are almost always white women, and their meltdowns are still usually played for laughs. But I wanted to show what it would look like to have a character who is so afraid of everyone leaving her behind that she can’t help but leave herself in all these ways, whether it’s by drinking way too much and driving home afterward or avoiding important conversations with the people in her life that she loves. I wanted to show all the small and big ways that we as humans abandon ourselves when we’ve been abandoned many times before.

At the same time, I did notice throughout the course of writing the novel that whenever I put Ro in the position of having to take care of someone else, she was actually not bad at it, much to her surprise. It’s sometimes hard and uncomfortable for her, but she’s able to stay present in those moments in ways that she can’t always be for herself. I wanted to show how she is able to learn how to do those things and, in time, show up for herself too.

Rumpus: As someone who balances full-time employment with writing, do you have self-care practices that help you continue creating art?

Chung: I’m very used to thinking of myself as a brain in a jar. I don’t always remember to consider my bodily needs, especially when things get really busy or when I’m in the middle of an engrossing project. I’ve had to remind myself over the years to slow down when I need to and to take care of the container through which I experience the world.

My main tip is to listen to your body as much as you can. Take breaks and sleep when you need to. I’m someone who can easily ignore all my body’s warning signs and just keep going until the point of exhaustion. It’s just not worth it most of the time. There’s no need to flagellate yourself in the name of your art, and the wellspring of your creativity can’t be replenished if you don’t rest, no matter how guilty you might feel for not getting down a certain number of words per day. I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself in doing this. Now, whenever I feel like all the creativity is gone and I’ve lost it for good, I’ve at least learned to believe that’s not true. It’s my lizard brain panicking. I know it will come back. The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.

Rumpus: I laughed throughout the book, sometimes out loud, but it surprised me because some of my laughter was near moments of strife or grief. To what extent does humor and absurdity color your understanding of grief? How can humor be a tool in explaining grief, if at all?

Chung: Humor is so important to me, both as a writer and as a human being. Humor oftentimes hinges around this element of surprise. There’s this idea that writing about grief or difficult experiences can’t be funny or that it’s one note. So much of life isn’t like that, though. There have been times in my life where I’m going through heavy situations, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh if I see something surprising or ridiculous. Even in moments of my own despondency, I sometimes laugh at myself because of how dramatic I know I’m being. I think it’s important to be able to do that because otherwise life can be overwhelmingly difficult, and having those moments where you’re either laughing at yourself or at the situation is healthy and also lifesaving in a way. In terms of writing, I think funny scenes can sharpen the emotional quality of the sad ones, and vice versa. It’s like in cooking, where you have complementary but contrasting flavors, they heighten each other.

 

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Author photo by S.M. Sukardi

“Actually, I’m Not Grateful”: A Conversation with Stephanie Foo

After graduating from college, Stephanie Foo created a podcast called Get Me On This American Life. In an effort to make this dream come true, she borrowed radio equipment and hitchhiked to the world’s largest pornography conference in Texas to find stories. She interned, then became a producer of the radio show Snap Judgement. In 2014, Foo landed her dream job at This American Life—where she remained as a producer for five years and, in the process, won an Emmy. She was a 2019–2020 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism and has published essays in the New York Times and New York Magazine.

In February 2022, Foo released her memoir, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine Books). It’s the story of her real self, a woman functioning with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), a condition that can develop over the years following prolonged abuse. Foo’s memoir told the story of childhood trauma, parental abandonment, and the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. Finding limited resources to help her, Foo set out to heal herself and map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

We met via Zoom, where we spoke about the paperback release of her book (now a New York Times bestseller), how writing for the page is different from writing for the ear, why childhood trauma is often excused by traditionalists, and what she would tell her younger self if she had the chance.

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The Rumpus: What about journalism appealed to you?

Stephanie Foo: Journalism brought me out of my box, forced me to talk to others. I could have these social interactions that are scripted in a safe way. Everybody knew what their role was. I appreciate it made me a more curious, open person. Brought logic to the chaos. I could bring order to other people’s stories even if I couldn’t bring order to my own. It was satisfying and fun and made it easy to completely throw myself into it and dissociate from other things like trauma.
Rumpus: So after years of telling other people’s stories on This American Life and elsewhere, why did you decide to tell your own?

Foo: Every time I was able to showcase somebody’s story, one that represented a larger group of people, there was always a great response from our audience. I found myself as a potential representative of a larger group, which had no representative. There wasn’t a first-person story about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so I thought, “I know how to do this.”

Rumpus: Writing is different from radio, of course, but exactly how different?

Foo: Writing a book is so much more relaxed than making a podcast or a radio show. There’s so much more time to consider the topic, do research, and go over many drafts to shape it into what I think is ultimately my voice rather than chaotically panic and put something out every week.

Rumpus: I read your powerful New York Times Mother’s Day piece. How have you evolved as a writer?

Foo: I think I was always a writer. However, I just didn’t let myself think of myself as one because I hadn’t published much since college. Even though radio producing is just writing—it’s the exact same thing except you read it out loud—I shouldn’t have needed the validation of the book or the New York Times article. It certainly helped, since I don’t have an MFA or anything. I didn’t know if my writing, after so many years of being written for the ear, translated to the page anymore.
When I was writing for radio, especially at This American Life, it wasn’t really my voice. It was my voice through the lens of an entire room of between three and ten people shaping my voice into the ideal of what it could be. But this book was mine, which was both intimidating and fun and freeing.

Rumpus: What kind of book did you set out to write?

Foo: I read a lot of memoirs and science-y books written by clinicians and experts, which I found to be lacking because they didn’t show the healing process. Meanwhile, a lot of trauma memoirs are just descriptions of all the horrible experiences that have happened for like 290 pages, and then in the last thirty, the person gets better. Everything is okay. I thought, “No, I’m sure that journey was a lot more arduous.” I wanted to learn from their journey. It was the same in the clinician books, as well, a long exploration of all the negative effects of C-PTSD on people’s brains and then a very small section in the back about what would actually heal.

My goal was to write a book that would be a resource, to show you’re not alone in what you’re going through, to normalize a lot of the feelings. I provided the basic science and psychology behind complex PTSD, so people can know what they’re up against. I hoped to educate them and provide a lot of the resources I found helpful. I aspired to show it is very much possible to get better. This book would be a roadmap for other people who didn’t know where they might go. I wanted the book to provide hope because I didn’t have it when I was diagnosed. Sometimes trauma memoirs can be so difficult to read, and if there is hope, it’s just a little at the end.

My desire was for the book to come from an optimistic place because having C-PTSD is painful enough. I didn’t want to make the process of reading the book agonizing throughout the whole thing. It was very important to me that only the first fifty pages detailed my abuse.

I wanted it to be the book I wished I’d had when I was first diagnosed, which I feel would have made my healing journey so much shorter.

Rumpus: Why do you think your healing would have been briefer if you had a book like yours when you were diagnosed with C-PTSD?

Foo: I would have felt so much less shame and despair. Mental illness is so pathologized. It’s so isolating. C-PTSD is not in the DSM, and it’s a relatively new diagnosis. I think there is societal prejudice around PTSD. The history of PTSD has been focused on soldiers, men at war. I think there’s a lot of sexism, a sort of racism within. That, and an underappreciation for childhood trauma and its lifelong effects. It’s been normalized. Judith Herman writes a lot about the lasting trauma in people who have experienced sexual assault. This is not to shit on survivors of war, which is very real and terrible, but trauma is much wider. I feel like it’s taken society a long time to catch up to that understanding.

Rumpus: Was it healing to write the book, and was it difficult to write the traumatic scenes?

Foo: Different authors have different processes. For some, writing heals. It was important for me to have the healing come before the writing in order to locate that optimism. There was a lot of casual writing that happened during the healing process, but I didn’t take the organization and the real writing seriously until I felt like I had gone through a year and a half of a very intensive healing journey. And I felt like I was in a really good place, so this made the writing easier. I was able to have a lot of empathy and generosity toward myself at those times instead of feeling the self-loathing I’d felt earlier.

The first fifty pages were the most difficult to write, and I wrote those many, many times. I just had to practice a lot of self-care. Those were tough to relive. I think my dissociation protected me. Dissociation helped me to force out what I could, then go play video games for the rest of the afternoon.

Rumpus: Did your feelings about your parents change over the course of writing the book?

Foo: I don’t know. It hasn’t brought forgiveness, if that’s what you’re wondering. It hasn’t made me less disappointed or angry. I think the healing process, if anything, made me angrier at them because it made me realize what I deserved as a child. Learning to treat myself with kindness has taught me that what I received was criminal and unacceptable. So yeah, I don’t think it’s made me forgive them. I hold them accountable for what they have done.

However, their cultural context was important—they had a lot of their own unresolved and untreated trauma—but instead of making me less angry at them, writing the book made me angrier at some of the societal forces that contributed to my parents’ situation. I’m just sharing and spreading that rage around.

It’s also made me angrier at our health care system in the United States and how it really doesn’t serve. It’s made for white, privileged, educated people. There is just such a distinct lack of culturally responsive care. People like my parents could have gotten the help that they needed if that care was more accessible.

Rumpus: What has been the response from people who have read this book?

Foo: It’s overwhelmingly positive. The book has received over 11,000 five-star Goodreads reviews. I receive a dozen messages a day, for the past year, from people saying, “You’ve changed my life, you saved my life, you’re giving me hope, you make me feel less alone. . . .” It’s exactly what I set out to do with the memoir. The fact that it worked is a great relief and a great honor. I feel very proud, and I hope this opens the door for more narratives like mine. A lot of people have told me my book has inspired them to write. I hope to see those books joining mine out in the world.

Rumpus: How does it feel that therapists and educators have started using your book as a tool?

Foo: It’s so affirming! It’s wonderful to know I’ve had this impact because I have so many complaints against therapists, not therapists in general, but against some of the ways therapists practice and the mental health care system. I just want it to be easier for those who come after me.

Rumpus: Did you feel pressure about representing the Asian American community?

Foo: Yes. I was charting new territory by writing about domestic violence and child abuse in the Asian American community. It’s sort of hinted at but excused in The Joy Luck Club, but the story is always Asian American parents can be difficult, but you must be grateful to them because they have provided so much. I was writing something edgy and dangerous, saying, “Actually, I’m not grateful. This wasn’t unacceptable. This was abuse.” We need to talk about abuse.

Rumpus: Is it strange that trauma has also driven you to become the writer you are?

Foo: Sometimes I feel I have this success because of my PTSD. It informed my drive. Literally, I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t have PTSD. I would trade not having so much success for being happier. I would rather have been loved than not have had to write this book.

Rumpus: About healing, how would you describe your current state?

Foo: I am healing. I have done a lot of healing. I wouldn’t say I’m done, but it’s much better than it was before.

Rumpus: What would you recommend to someone who is in a survival mode or being abused?

Foo: I think what I would tell my younger self is this: “You need to know you deserve love. You deserve better. And go chase that love. Run as fast as you can away from those who aren’t going to give it to you. Run as fast as you can toward anyone who knows you deserve love, even though it’s scary and you’re going to be skeptical of them. Run toward the love.”

 

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Author photo by Bryan Derballa

The Spiritual Fact of Our Oneness: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan’s second poetry collection, Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) is a stunning tryptic that powerfully explores themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, and queer love. At the center of the collection is the poem, “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a meditation on the meaning of belonging, home, and the mysteries of fate. Shanahan wrote it after sustaining serious injuries in a bus accident in Morocco, while he was a Fulbright Scholar researching his mother’s homeland. Shanahan’s poems ask difficult questions for which he provides no easy answers. He encourages us to engage with complexities, nuances, and narratives that may differ from our own. There is pain in these poems, but also joy and hope. At the heart of Shanahan’s work is love and the belief we are all interconnected, changed by every encounter we experience. One cannot read Shanahan’s words without being changed.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Charif Shanahan over Zoom about identity constructs, the complexity and nuance found in life, and the “spiritual fact” of our oneness.

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The Rumpus: Congratulations on this truly amazing collection. Can you share how it came about?

Charif Shanahan: In 2015, I left my job and my apartment in New York and went to Morocco for what I thought would be a year on the Fulbright to research my family genealogy and representations of Blackness in the Maghreb. About two months into my time there, I was on an overnight bus that crashed. I was badly hurt and medevaced to Zurich, where I was in the hospital for two months. I had three surgeries. After I left the hospital, I ended up back in the Bronx, where I was born and raised, for a long convalescence—in my childhood bedroom.

That experience is the genesis of the book, and its center. The other two sections of the book, which is a tryptic, take up themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, queer love and sexuality.

The beating heart of the whole thing, of my first book also, and probably of my vision as an artist, is love, in all its expressions, what denies it and what makes it possible. The grief that accompanies that love has to do with the separateness of our species, how we have divided ourselves, sometimes in ways that feel positive, sometimes in ways that are apparently neutral, and sometimes in obviously corrosive and violent ways. I believe that a unified sense of “us” is our initial state of being in the world– before we are named, gendered, raced, and cultivated into a self, a person. In my poems, I am trying to return us there, to bring the singing voice of the poem and the reader back to that space.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the poem that centers the collection: “On the Overnight from Agadir.”

There’s tension, deciding whether to make the trip to your mother’s homeland, the tension between the desire to discover and the desire to disappear—or maybe to just get a dog. The search for place, for home, for meaning, your thoughts about time, about the meaning of your work. The poem is so huge in its reach and heart. While you were recuperating, in a forced stillness physically, did you do a lot of writing? Even if it were just in your head?

Shanahan: Poetry was nowhere near my consciousness in the acute moments after the accident, or in the months after. There was supposed to be only one surgery, then there was a second, then a third. With complication after complication, I just wanted to get the fuck out, to get to the other side of it.

I began to explore the experience in poems when I arrived in California, the September after the accident, and it’s amazing how fate carried me into that process. My first book was picked up shortly after I had arrived in Morocco, so my intention that fall had been to apply for fellowships and university teaching positions around the country, to see where I would end up after Morocco.

The accident happened at the time when I would’ve started doing that. While I was in the hospital one morning, between surgeries two and three, I thought to myself, If you get out of this, you’re going to need something to do! It was December 2. I remembered that the deadline for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford was December 1, so it had passed that midnight. I was disappointed. Then it occurred to me that because Zurich was nine hours ahead of California, the deadline hadn’t yet passed in local time! I had thirty-five minutes to throw together the application, which I managed to do, using pre-existing application materials. Months later, recovering in the Bronx, I was lamenting my circumstances, wondering what was next, when ding! an email came in from Eavan Boland. I arrived in California that September, and it was there that I began to metabolize the experience creatively. 

Rumpus: It feels like this was a poem you had to write.

Shanahan: The experience was so complex and layered that I needed to process what had happened to me, and language is one of the tools I use to contemplate, to process experience. The poem was the eventual byproduct of that process, which, at its start, was about something else, about integrating experience. Somewhere along the way, the processing had occurred and I began thinking aesthetically.

Rumpus: How did you decide to put that poem in the middle of the book?

Shanahan: The first question I had was whether it could be a book-length poem. I generated many, many, many, many pages. In my discussions with Louise Glück at Stanford, from whom I had the privilege of learning, and in my own thinking about the poem, it became clear that it could be a book-length poem, but didn’t need to be. I whittled down the pages and distilled the poem into its current form. In its shortened version, it would exist alongside other work, and centering it then felt intuitive to me.

Rumpus: You write a lot about social identity and physical positioning. All of this is done to find the place of belonging we call “home.” Has the accident, the aftermath, and the process of metabolizing the experience into poems changed your concept of what constitutes home?

Shanahan: It returned me to an understanding, a wisdom, that had always been inside of me that I had lost touch with somehow. There is a truth, I believe, inside each of us, whether we are connected to it or not, that we are at home wherever we are. We are at home in the body. Sure, certain spaces might comfort or energize us more than others. There are places where we feel a sense of kinship to the physical earth, the people, the culture that’s expressed there. But we are diminished, I think, when we begin to depend on something outside of ourselves for a sense of safety, or self-possession.

I have an older poet friend who, in a long spiritual conversation we once had, said, completely earnestly, “Home is a sentimental fantasy!” I understand now more clearly what she meant.

Rumpus: “‘Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon,’” a brilliant poem that appears early in the collection, begins with what seems like a universal need to express one’s self: “I want to tell you what for me it has been like.”

The barriers you experience to that expression are not universal, however: “To speak at all / I must occupy a position / in a system whose positions / I appear not to occupy.” You are both, as you say, “A part and apart.”

This feels like a really impossible situation. Can you speak to how that position/non-position and language are connected and how existing in that liminal space adds both an urgency to the need to be heard and, at the same time, a questioning of whether that’s possible?

Shanahan: The poem meditates on that very question and, importantly, I think, doesn’t reach a conclusion. I’m not really interested in posturing at irrefutable conclusions, or easy answers; I want instead to put a spotlight on complexity, on nuance. I believe that racial discourse in this country is often flattened into one of a few mainstream narratives, probably in part because many people are resistant to even the clearest and most urgent issues—police brutality, for example. I don’t mean to say those narratives, or the portions of the conversation, that are most central today should not be as central as they are. I’m saying that there are many narratives. If you are in a body, you are racialized. You are having a racialized experience. What if integrating an experience, like my own, seemingly adjacent to larger mainstream narratives, or other narratives that are less familiar, into the larger racial discourse, can actually help us advance that discourse? I believe it can and does.

As for the poem, one cause of the limits on expression is the tendency to conceive of race, myopically, in terms of a static presence or absence of privilege, when privilege is dynamic. I have privilege in one room, then I absolutely do not in the next. And the reason I lack privilege in the second room is the reason I have it in the first. How do you “position” (name) that? So yes, let’s keep talking, let’s put everything, and everyone’s experience, on the table.

Rumpus: The way you write about your mom is so beautiful. I’m thinking of “Not the Whole Thing, but a Large Part of the Story,” of “Trace Evidence,” and of “Two Rooms Down the Hall,” in which you write “When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying I love you. / She’s saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother she wished / He’d just find a nice blonde girl and settle down, I took her by the face / And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance/ told her I love you, and you are crazy.”

Your mom taught you a lot about identity, and while her own view of herself seems solid, it didn’t match the spaces in which people saw her.

Shanahan: That dissonance has been a primary question of my own identity and has required me to examine the instability of identity constructs, and in particular racial constructs, over time and space. My mother is from the Maghreb, born and raised in Morocco, identifies as Arab, as Muslim, as Moroccan, as woman. These were the identity markers germane to her experience.

It wasn’t that the color of her skin did not have meaning in Morocco. It of course did. But when my mother arrived here, to a new cultural and national context, with its terms of identity, its pathologies, her Blackness took on new meaning, new significance—and often contentiously. Now, it’s not that I think a person in her circumstances would need to revise their self-concept, but I think it becomes especially important to consider those circumstances when children are involved, when a first-generation Black American experience is happening outside of an African American lineage. I’m writing into that generational dissonance. As I ask in a poem that didn’t make it into the collection, “Why are the parts of her that she cannot see / the only parts of me that I can?”

Rumpus: This title made me laugh: “While I Wash My Face, I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me,” because, Charif, you ask impossible questions all the time!

Shanahan: Guilty.

Rumpus: What I found interesting in this poem and several others is that you address yourself in the second person. You directly ask yourself questions. How did that choice come about?

Shanahan: The first piece is the distancing effect of using the “you as I,” the permission it grants you to inhabit a different mind space around your subjects, to separate from them in a way. The self that I’m addressing is part of me, is inside me, but I’m able to inhabit or situate myself in a different internal position vis-a-vis the material at hand.

The gesture is also necessitated by something I believe and that I think a fair amount of people I know would find difficult to trust: the self speaking to you right now, is not the self I inhabited (or that inhabited me) at the beginning of this conversation. We have changed one another in this dialogue of thirty or forty-five minutes. It doesn’t mean that this change needs to be profound, or on a constitutive level. It means a shifting occurs, by virtue of our “contact.” There is information about living, art, human connection, language, race—about everything that is alive inside this interaction—that you have integrated, or that at least is inside you waiting to be integrated. The same is true for me.

Rumpus: We talked about interpretations, and the way people bring with them their views of others when they meet them. Is it scary to put yourself on the page this way, while knowing people are going to hear what they hear and see what they see through their own lens?

Shanahan: I love what you’re saying because it’s an element of my work that can be easily misunderstood. A reader might say these are “confessional” poems or poems that seem generated by a psychological or emotional compulsion to reveal, to be seen. I wouldn’t agree with that at all. I think honesty, or transparency, is an aesthetic choice.

We shouldn’t assume anything that happens within the body of any poem is an event that has actually been lived. In the moments when I am most apparently honest about experiences that one might be expected to hide or keep to themselves, I am more than sharing myself or reflecting myself to an individual, I am reflecting the reader back to the reader. I am reflecting you back to you. One of the lines in “Fig Tree” is, in a similar vein: “Do I apologize? I am of this same world.” I didn’t ask for any of this, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I genuinely believe that I am you. It’s a notion that, again, many find hard to accept, or trust. I don’t mean to flatten our differences or to suggest that we’re having the same experience. The constructed world, though constructed, is real. In a way, it’s the first level of experience. My story has to be your story on some level, and yours, mine. We are beholden to one another. We are here at the same time.

Rumpus: What would you like people to get from this book?

Shanahan: I would like them to recognize themselves in a life that isn’t theirs, or maybe even like any they’ve known. I’d like them to be reminded of, again, the spiritual fact of our oneness—in a way that doesn’t feel irrelevant to how we live but can actually animate how we live, that can shape how we move through these lives and these bodies, at this time. I hope there are people who inhabit identity positions very different from my own, who can nonetheless see themselves in this book. I hope the book will awaken some people to the complexities of racial identity, especially today in an increasingly globalized world. I hope that the book can reach people’s hearts and souls and generate new conversation around the subjects I’m exploring.

Rumpus: Do you find that message, this book is especially necessary today?

Shanahan: I often ask my students, “The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?” There are many answers to that question, of course, but chiefly, for me, it’s about the elevation of consciousness, the understanding of portions of human experience, even when that experience is far from our own, that poetry enables.

As a species, we can’t even agree, for example, that the climate crisis is real, or, as I put it in a poem in the book, that “we are all the same animal.” We can’t get on the same page about scientific fact, even when it requires our urgent, collective attention if we’re going to make it. And that must be rooted in the competing priorities generated by our separateness.

So yes, I think now is as good a time as any to spread a message of oneness.

Rumpus: What’s next for you?

Shanahan: I am working on a memoir that treats, in prose, the same subjects as the books of poetry, and I’ve also started my third book of poetry—a book-length epistolary poem to Whiteness. The poem is poly-vocal, written by many “authors,” and moves across time and space. There’s a section that comes out of the seventh century Arab slave trade, for example, preceding a section that comes out of the contemporary Bronx. It’s very global in orientation, as I am as a person and a poet, and I’m excited to keep ‘finding’ it.

 

 

 

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Author photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

Leave what you can, take the rest: An Interview with Idra Novey

 

 

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Author photo by Jesse Ditmar

Migration and return: De’Shawn Charles Winslow on going back to West Mills

Narratives that feature the history and intrigue of Black Southern culture draw me in. De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s 2019 debut novel In West Mills featured characters mining the untold to understand their place in their small town and the world. The book gave a multigenerational look at secrets and revelations, and his second novel, Decent People, adds the urgent draw of an unsolved crime with a sleuth driven by love and a sense of justice.

A character in his first novel refers to another character as “blood but not family,” a clear insight that echoes through both books. Winslow likewise builds the bonds that are family but not blood, showing how people find and create kinship and support.

Decent People begins with Jo Wright, set to retire in West Mills after decades in New York. She is on the verge of completing the dream, finally sharing a home with her long-distance love, Olympus Seymore. That plan is upended when Lymp is accused of the murder of his three half-siblings. Their estrangement seems reason enough for the sheriff to assume Lymp’s guilt and stop investigating. This is where Jo begins the challenging task of finding the truth.

Winslow sets the story in the 1970s. The official markers of Jim Crow are gone, but the West Mills canal remains the divider between the Black and white communities, a parallel to so many remaining divisions. The town is a junction point that features Black characters seeking exodus, those returning, and many making do where they are. Queer characters search for community amid judgment. The reckoning between unacknowledged children and their parents becomes central. Adult friendships and intimacies are solidified. The family tensions coexist with the solace of chosen kin and unlikely allies.

We spoke via telephone and email about distance, unknowing, and returning to a complicated home.

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The Rumpus: While reading Decent People, I thought about the literary and mystery bones of novels by Walter Mosley and Attica Locke. In addition to Black Southern settings and migration, they show characters finding answers that can be hard to reconcile. In In West Mills, a central character wants to “unknow” what she has just heard. How does the desire to “unknow” work as an idea in Decent People?

De’Shawn Charles Winslow: Once the person learns something about their history or a close friend or family member’s history, they have to change the way they view themselves and their personal situations. Sometimes that knowing can become work, an opportunity, or a burden to face a bunch of realities they’ve been ignoring. Well, it forces you to face the fact that they are imperfect.

Rumpus: You set this story in the 1970s, so you had characters with a backstory during Jim Crow, and they’re dealing with the aftermath of major legal changes in America. The book is in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Loving decision, but you show clearly that changes are slow and challenging in West Mills.  How did you balance that will to change versus the more general idea of progress?

Winslow: There was a continuity that I didn’t realize was happening. The town and the people weren’t changing. The town was changing physically with new businesses popping up, but the people’s mindsets were very much the same. Black people stay out of white folks’ way and largely vice versa, and you have the respectability politics of it all.

My mother is the second oldest of nine children, and she and the first three or four of them went to segregated schools. When her younger siblings graduated high school, it was integrated, but I also know that my aunts and uncles, the younger ones, didn’t have close white friends. Even though they were in an integrated school, things were still highly segregated. That speaks to what you just said about the will to change being there.

Rumpus: One way to find some change was through migration, and In West Mills centered characters who migrated. You feature characters leaving for educational opportunities. Queer characters leave to find community. The reasons for leaving were always central to character development. How did that movement away from West Mills become important as you shaped identity?

Winslow: Some characters from In West Mills definitely moved away to find more people, more community, and feel less like pariahs. I know education was available, and I won’t say a lot, but I know a fair amount was available to Black people in parts of the South. But so many people went north because they felt there would be less resistance and maybe access to more types of education instead of just becoming a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a nurse’s assistant. Leaving was about trying to protect themselves and succeed in a way they felt the South wouldn’t allow.

Rumpus: On the other side of that, Decent People shows the hopes and the challenges of returning. What factors shaped this reverse migration that’s central in the novel?

Winslow: The returning is about rest in a way.  I would imagine that it was also work for them, leaving to go and pursue safety, community, and higher education, moving to these very fast-paced places with a lot of competition and a higher cost of living. By coming back home with some money and some education, they felt they could rest a little bit easier.

Rumpus: The mystery in Decent People is compelling, and I don’t want to ask anything that might disrupt that reading experience, but I want to ask about the sense of truth-telling that the characters manage.  Someone in Decent People says, “There was no way out, so lies would have to suffice.” Let’s talk about lies and secrets as different literary elements. I’m interested in how you used the unspoken, unsaid, or untrue and how those are so necessary to the storytelling, especially when the lies and secrets are protective.

Winslow: As a writing technique, I think having secrets gives the reader a question that’s dangling out there. If they remember that, most readers grasp that question and carry it with them. Propels them through the book. It creates that suspense, but it also creates the opportunity for more bad behavior because people are trying to hold on to these secrets or these lies. They just keep committing these acts, whether big or small, to protect the lie or protect the secret. That creates suspense and a propulsive experience for the reader.

Rumpus: Jo returns to West Mills, but her closest ally and sounding board is her brother Herschel, who supports her from New York. How did that relationship become central to the storytelling?

Winslow: I wanted Herschel to be a little bit like a therapist to Jo. I kept him in New York the whole time because he was old enough when they left to know so much, and I didn’t want him to end up becoming Jo’s co-sleuth. I wanted him to be like, “Listen, I worked hard for this life, and I have safety here in New York as a queer man. This is your battle because you want this man, and you figure it out. Here is a little bit of advice I can offer you as someone who lived there and is older.” I wanted them to have a close relationship.

Rumpus: Herschel is a gay man who found some distance from judgment and hate, and we see that harm threatening the next generation of queer children in West Mills who are too young to seek the safety of exodus. How did you define that harm in both novels?

Winslow: I was showing a combination of patriarchy and religious beliefs—and then some people would say that’s the same thing depending on the religion. In small towns that are largely Christian, people uphold these teachings, these beliefs that a man should be supreme in the home or that he should procreate so that the family name can carry on. People who aren’t even necessarily religious can uphold these ideals of hypermasculinity, and sometimes I don’t even know if they realize it. Some will try to uphold those beliefs so much that they will put their children through different types of torture, whether it’s physical or emotional, to uphold an ideal.

Rumpus: The book gives us a sense of migration and return, and I’m also interested in how those journeys work in your life as a writer.  Ernest. J. Gaines spoke about living in California while writing about Louisiana. Jesmyn Ward has touched on her return to Mississippi. What was your experience writing about the South from a distance?

Winslow: I was in New York, and then I went to Iowa. That’s where I started In West Mills. I was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to write these books living there. I really do. It amazes me how vividly I was able to see the town of South Mills, North Carolina, and a lot of little details just came flooding in. I would write the name of the road down, and I’d say, “Let me change that. Let me make a name up for that because it was getting too real.” The distance allowed me to be able to write about the place with a little bit more compassion and with less tsk-tsk.  

Rumpus: I’m thinking about the idea that writing and publishing mainly default to heterosexual relationships. Have you seen that at work in your experience?

Winslow: A little bit. Because heterosexuality is what’s given to us in the mainstream, sometimes I fear that if I wrote an all-out queer book, I would have a lower readership. That is a real fear that I have and something publishing needs to work on. There’s a lot of queer representation out there, but I have seen articles about how queer books by and about queer people are published at a much lower rate than books that center completely around straight people. I definitely want to acknowledge writers like Robert Jones, Jr. and his novel, The Prophets, because he took a really big leap to write about two enslaved gay men. I think that book is going to open doors for a lot of young queer writers, especially Black male queer writers.

Rumpus: The Prophets was groundbreaking work. Any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

Winslow: Maurice Carlos Ruffin has a forthcoming book, The American Daughters, that is historical and centered around Black women in New Orleans. So, I’m excited about that. Regina Porter is working on her second book, which might be linked to The Travelers.

Rumpus: You’ve shown the importance of a deep connection between place and identity, especially when we consider the historical period. In your teaching life, how do you encourage students and other writers to develop those links between setting and character?

Winslow: I advise my students who write realism to try to know a great deal about the place they are writing about. I believe that if a writer knows a place well, the characters will, too. That familiarity with place tends to guide characters’ decisions and/or the plot.

Rumpus: Do you care to share any news on the next project? 

Winslow: All I’ll say for now is that I’m stepping away from the fictional town of West Mills for my next project. I’m going to use a real North Carolina town, and it’ll be set in the ‘80s. No murders this time, but there will be deaths.

Rumpus: What lessons from In West Mills were most helpful as you completed Decent People?

Winslow: Writing Decent People felt like the first time all over again, so I honestly don’t know, haha.

 

 

 

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Author photo by Julie R Keresztes

The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. Stallings

When teaching formal forms to my poetry students, at some point I inevitably turn their attention to A.E. Stallings’ poems that never fail to delight, challenge, and surprise with their dexterity of craft and unexpected, revelatory results. “The ancients taught me how to sound modern” says Stallings, a feat so paradoxical, yet one she continues, unequivocally, to accomplish. The poet and scholar of mythological and classical studies draws us into the intimate and grandly epic, and with a taut, formalist hand and gifted musical ear, converges sound and meaning in lines that maintain a lustrous tension in addressing the everyday, the mythic, marriage, mothering, and the urgently political. Her re-examinations of iconic female figures from antiquity, coupled with often witty, complex explorations of domestic life are testament to her impressive imagination and facility with language—all earning her, to my mind, a rightful place in the feminist authorial pantheon.

Stallings lives in Athens, Greece, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, a winner of the Poets’ Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award, and Richard Wilbur Award. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow, and has translated Lucretius’s The Nature of Things and Hesiod’s Works and Days.

I jumped at the opportunity to spend time with her recently published collection, This Afterlife: Selected Poems that reflects her prolific career. At the start of 2023 I emailed her questions about life and work.

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The Rumpus: In the past you’ve stated, “I like rhyme partly for the way it draws me through a poem, often towards something surprising,” and also that “form is not the enemy of urgency, but its instrument.” I could not agree more. And yet, while formal constraints amp up pressure on the confines of the page and in the poet’s mind, and that pressure can force language and imagery in marvelous, mysterious ways, it can, potentially, feel limiting. Any thoughts on that?

A.E. Stallings: I need limits. Limiting for me is a positive thing. Unlimited freedom for me would lead to creative paralysis. I don’t feel hemmed in by rhyme as a rule, maybe because I am just very practiced and adept in it. But if I have painted myself into a corner, or into too much tidiness or patness, with a rhyme scheme or with a particular pair (or trio) of rhymes, I am willing to toss them out and start afresh. (When having trouble with a rhyme, it is always important to look at the rhymes as a unit and both under consideration: Think of them as entangled particles, a kind of unit.) If any part of a poem is becoming a problem rather than an aid—number of lines (sonnet), syllable count, meter, rhyme—and I am still interested in what I am tackling, I’m willing to tear it down and start from scratch. Sometimes this happens over months or years. But the “scratch” will most of the time be a different recipe of constraints, perhaps with more free or random elements. That said, I do dabble in free verse and even the odd prose poem.

Rumpus: I’ve noticed that even when you don’t employ an elaborate, recognizable form such as the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, ghazal etc., you often keep to a five-beat line. So, I wondered about that as a cadence you naturally lean into. Also, is there a form you love best? I know that may be an unfair question, and one that changes over time and may be dependent upon subject matter at hand.

Stallings: Yes, I suppose blank verse is also one of my default modes, and a loose iambic pentameter line. It is such a good unit for the breath, and for parsing out sentences of thought, and often has a feeling of “rightness” if it comes at the conclusion of a piece. I am really fond of shorter and hymn meters, which are more songlike, but they aren’t as good for pieces that are meant to sound like utterances instead of songs, and also tend to want to rhyme more. I find syllabics really exciting to work with, and when I can get a syllabic poem off the ground, I am always a little giddy about it. It’s a different way of thinking about rhythm—the contrast not between syntax and meter or how a word falls into a foot or across a foot, but how to fill up the syllable real estate—will this be (in a five-syllable line) five chunky monosyllables that stomp along, or one sweeping five-syllable word? And, so on.

Rumpus: In your earlier poems—in Archaic Smile, for instance, you conjure such striking “re-tellings” or “re-voicings” of female archetypes—Persephone, Medea, Penelope, Daphne, Eurydice—among others. In entering their personas, donning their skins, so to speak, the resulting narrative feels importantly feminist. In later works, the speaker’s current concerns and reality feel front and center with the ancient veils, and threads echoing through in less obvious, overt ways, as if the mythic personas and sensibilities subtly resonate up from underneath into the poet’s present after all those years of marinating in them.

Stallings: At a certain point a poet becomes one of their own influences to confront. One feels one cannot keep doing the same thing in the same way. But I still remain fascinated with these myths. I suppose my engagement with them now is more mitigated, and often also more inter-textual. Possibly the first method is more powerful, but I do find myself coming at the myths from different angles now. Perhaps living in Greece has been a factor, and being older, more of a mother than a daughter. (One thinks of Eavan Boland’s being able to enter the myth of Demeter/Persephone “anywhere.”) I do continue to write the odd persona poem, though, as for instance a couple of recent (still uncollected) poems from the vantage point of the fiftieth Danaid, and I’m always grateful for these convenient masks. (“Mask,” after all, is the meaning of “persona.”)

Rumpus: In relation to the above question, has your decades-long dwelling in Greece affected how the myth tropes enter or are entered into?

Stallings: Ah! I see I leaped ahead. Yes, living in Greece affects my reading of myth. You know people named Daphne, and Antigone, and Eurydice for one. And there is a different understanding of the layers of history and the diachronic life of places. I certainly read The Iliad and The Odyssey and the plays differently, with an awareness of geography, for instance, and how more current events overlay ancient and legendary ones, refugees, for instance, crossing the same stretch of water from the mainland to Lesbos that features in Achilles’ raids in The Iliad. And then there is living in Greek, a language I am both at home and at sea in.

Rumpus: Your poems that address the quotidian, the domestic, and what might seem, at first, to be trifling abstractions, have a way of expanding into unexpectedly grand and revelatory terrain. There are plenty of plays on words and turns of phrase to delight the reader’s mind, but this elevation of everyday matters concerning the raising of children, the maintenance of marriage, and embrace of the mundane is laudable and ultimately, feminist and humanitarian in my estimation. Nothing’s to be taken for granted. Thoughts?

Stallings: That’s very good to hear! The Greek poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke used to talk about poetry being for her, a state of mind, a sort of altered state of consciousness, one you are either in at the time or not. At any given moment everything is poetic or nothing is, and I somewhat buy into that. That is to say, there are times when even—or especially—everyday objects or events vibrate with meaning. Our lives may seem to be lived on the small scale of the everyday but, because we are mortal, because ultimately everything is at stake, also play out against something universal and important. Words themselves are part of that, and wordplay, even or again especially the humble pun, sometimes seem to me a kind of sympathetic magic. To me, Greek myths themselves are often domestic (so often about families, for instance, and romantic relationships), and for me intersect in the mytho-domestic sphere. But mostly I am pleased to hear that this embrace of the mundane strikes you as laudable, feminist, and humanitarian!

Rumpus: So much has transpired politically, economically, culturally across the globe, and certainly there in your part of the world and surrounding countries. The crisis in Syria; the displacement of whole populations of people. This becomes more evident in your later poems, specifically selections from Like. How have the events around you and here in the United States affected the direction of your work?

Stallings: From the moment we moved to Greece, we have been living in interesting times here. Being on the front line of several global crises has meant, I think, wanting to be more of a witness in my writing. I wanted the tear gas to be able to roll into the poems, and to address things that were of current concern in my life. I started thinking of some of the refugee populations entering Greece—from the Levant, from Afghanistan even—as belonging in some ways to Cavafy’s world, and historically connected to Greece since ancient times. A lot of what has happened in the US, especially since 2016, I have found distressing, but I am not sure much of that gets into the poems. I still lead a weekly poetry workshop, which started in 2015, with refugee women, from Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. One perspective this has given me is the importance of poetry and the arts to our collective humanity, how it isn’t luxury but necessity. The cultures these women come from invariably prize poetry—and poets—higher than we do in Western Anglophone cultures. So, it is always inspiring, humbling, and grounding, to work with them.

Rumpus: As your children grow up and your life changes, do you see your concerns and modes as an artist shifting?

Stallings: My son is off at college now, and my daughter is a teenager, so, yes, I would say that affects my concerns. Childhood—my own and theirs—is a poetic source for me, a time when the world again vibrates with mysterious meaning, and when language acquisition strips even cliched expressions back to their original force. One thing, since 2017 when I suddenly understood better what we are facing, I worry about the world they will face with the climate catastrophe that we seem to be unwilling to address or even attempt to avoid. That frankly can make it hard to write at all, when your concern is about the end of the world as you know it, species vanishing etc. But I also think it is important for the poets to keep doing what they do, however futile it might seem. It is a way of preserving a sort of biodiversity—verbo-diversity—of experience and language. It is important to wonder at and appreciate what we have now.

Rumpus: Thank you for the tasty lagniappe (and uncollected translations!) included at the end of This Afterlife. I wonder how those didn’t show up in previous collections?

Stallings: We decided not to do a “new and selected,” but I did want people to have some things that weren’t available in the other books, to have some added value to this. There were always a handful of poems I rather regretted not including—just as one sometimes regrets including the odd poem!—and this was a chance to put them back into context. In some cases, they didn’t fit well with the themes of a book, or there were already too many sonnets or poems about Halloween or what have you. In a couple of cases an uncollected poem was super popular at readings (the Edna St. Vincent Millay one, for instance) and people kept asking where to find it. So, I thought it might be fun to give these poems another chance at an audience.

Rumpus: Might there be a favorite place in Greece you find particularly sublime or a little sacred? That inspires you? And if you could go there and relish a certain food you deem divine, what would that be?

Stallings: The ancients were very good at selecting real estate for temples. Greece is full of sublime, sacred spots. A favorite place not far from Athens is the temple to Artemis at Brauron. It was the place for Athenian girls to put away their childish things—a favorite doll, for instance—as they commenced womanhood. It also served as a sort of convent school for some well-born Athenian girls. The girls on the cusp of womanhood were known as “Little Bears.” The temple is nestled among some hills near a river and amidst wetlands. Perfect for a temple to Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt and wild animals. I love the combination of ancient ruins and wildlife—belching frogs, and water snakes, sparrows nesting in gaps in the column capitals, and bright red dragonflies hovering over the ancient spring where women dropped gold jewelry to make their prayers and wishes to the goddess for all kinds of women’s complaints—miscarriages or infertility—or in thanks for successful childbirth. The place definitely has a mystical energy to it.

 

 

 

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Author photo courtesy of author

The page is the stage: An interview with Junious Ward

Junious “Jay” Ward’s first full collection of poems, Composition, published by Button Poetry brings high expectations from the reader. This isn’t a book that spoon feeds. He plays with form—which one is right for the poem—and in our interview revealed he would try on a form and embrace the freedom of trying another one and starting over if it didn’t work.

That panoply of forms in the book grapple with one of the collection’s recurring themes: what it is like to live as a person of mixed race. Ward’s poetic forms are, in their way, saying I don’t want to be boxed in. I’m going to tell you my truth and my truth is going to look so many different ways. Early on in our friendship, I recall him telling me about Dr. Maria Root’s “A Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage” (reprinted in the appendix of Composition) and in which one of the declarations says, “I have the right not to keep the races within me separate…I have the right to identify myself differently in different situations.” There are so many ways to parse Black and white, but also a tension of giant brackets holding it all together.

In spoken word circles he’s known as Jay. It’s where Ward has his roots as National Slam champion in 2018 and Individual World Poetry Slam champion in 2019. Most recently he’s served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Charlotte, NC. We recently spoke over Zoom.

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The Rumpus: With your background in spoken word poetry, how do you write differently for slam than for the page? How do you think about the rhythm and the music that are so much a part of spoken word?

Junious Ward: I write differently for stage versus “the page.” But I recognize there’s a lot of poets right now from a spoken word background who do both at the same time. And they don’t necessarily write differently and their work stands up amazingly in both platforms. I write differently because I have to. Like when I’m writing for an audience, I feel like there are liberties I can take. If it’s performance poetry, it’s part writing, but also the nuance of being there and hearing the intonation of the inflections and seeing the choreography and just the overall energy—the page can’t necessarily do that. The page is the same way—there are things that don’t transcribe over to the stage. For example, enjambments and line breaks. Those things create their own cadence, their own rhythm, visuals, and in many cases, second meanings.

Rumpus: Several of your poems include blank spaces or brackets, such an interesting tactic for involving the reader. Is there a wrong or right answer for each of those blank spaces?

Ward: No, not necessarily. I’m thinking of the ones that are my take on zuihitsu. The way I set up the first paragraph, those brackets indicate race and you can go either way with it, but also, I’m a big fan of the reader’s imagination. If the reader’s imagination goes somewhere else, I think that’s very telling. Poems can be introspective, but inviting the reader to make their own conclusions allows them to be introspective with themselves as opposed to interrogating my work. It becomes an interrogation of themselves. So, I have guidelines of what those things are, but I’m very willing to leave that open to the reader because that allows them to experience it in a different way.

Rumpus: So much of the book contends with mixed racial identity, and I’m thinking specifically of your poem, “blessings” with its shape of two columns—left and right that meet in the middle. These separate columns with their poems and perspectives culminate in the middle and the whole is so much richer than the parts. Can you deconstruct how you came to this form?

Ward: I tend to read the parts before I read the whole, so that’s how I read it. The left column, which is my Black family reunion; the right column, which is my white family reunion. And then, the middle column. Then, I’ll read the whole thing together. It was fun and challenging to write. I had a consultation with Tyehimba Jess in a manuscript coaching class and his comment on several of the poems was the same: “This is good, but you need to push it. If you’re gonna push form, then you need to push it.” On that particular poem, his comment was I needed to torque it up a little bit.

Rumpus: Let’s hang with that for a second: “If you’re gonna push form, you’ve got to really push it.” Did he mean as a way of bringing Jay Ward to the page?

Ward: The original version of what would become this manuscript was probably written six or seven years ago. It was the finalist for two competitions: Write Bloody and Button. It didn’t make it to publication through either, so I let it sit for a while and then I went to Bread Loaf—it was actually conversations at Bread Loaf and conversations with Ross White of Bull City Press where I was saying I want to revisit this manuscript.

And I started thinking if, in some poems, I’m breaking form, and in some poems, I’m combining form, and in some poems, I’m trying to create a new form—then each poem becomes a metaphor for the whole work.

This idea of being mixed race, but also the idea of Blackness or the idea of dominant race, when you are multiracial or biracial. I spent about six months after Bread Loaf digging into forms more, trying to find out what each form does well—how would my poems benefit from a particular form—and then starting in that form and saying, “Ah, that doesn’t work.” Starting over, in a different form, and then combining them, and just seeing what happens—I probably spent six months doing that. Then, once I revised them that time, that’s when I had the manuscript class with Tyehimba.

So, I work with a lot of documents here. Originally, it was just erasures and blackouts, and Tyehimba said, “You know everybody does erasures, so if you’re gonna do erasures—if you’re gonna do a blackout—instead of always seeing to create subtext, what about super-text?” Like how can you use these documents in new ways to have this conversation? Because in my mind, I’m having a conversation with all the things that were in conversation with my parents when they got together—Senate Bill 219, an anti-miscegenation law, some of the snippets from the newspaper from a nearby city from where we grew up, all these things—I want to find a way to have a conversation with them. So, in some ways, I can kind of parse, not only my own existence, but sitting in my parents’ seat—how it was for them.

Then, to your point about sneaking some Jay Ward in there—prior to Bread Loaf and Callaloo, I was strictly a spoken word artist. So, it wasn’t until after Callaloo that I really started getting into publishing work. I am very meticulous about how I put together a performance, and I wanted to figure out what that looked like on the page. I wanted the page to be the stage and what does that mean—what does that look like? I’m not catering to an oral style in the work, but visually—the way you read it—is this going to jump off the page? Is it going to feel like a performance that I’m reading? So, I was interested in figuring that out.

Rumpus: Do blackouts and erasure poems show underrepresented voices in public works? Did you approach these pieces like you might ekphrasis?

Ward: Absolutely. I was very conscious of what black space and white space would do in the manuscript. I think it was Solmaz Sharif, in an essay about erasure, who made me think about blackouts and the satisfying nature of performing a violence to a document that performs a violence.

There’s at least one poem that has the erasure and blackout happening at the same time that creates this whole column of white space and column of black space that are doing similar things but to a different effect. Even in poems that weren’t blackouts, I was very conscious of the use of black space and white space.

Rumpus: How do footnotes work with blackouts as you have them in “Concerning a Problem”? [“Concerning a Problem” is a blackout of the letter Mildred Loving wrote to the attorney general following the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act.]

 Ward: I wanted to create super-text—I wanted there to be more to the conversation, so I wanted you to be able to read the poem, but also know some information behind it that would either give a different thought or context.

In “Concerning a Problem”—one of the footnotes can be read as part of the poem depending on how you read it. So it’s “Dear sir, I am.” One of the annotations coming off of “I am” is “not Black. I told the people so when they came to arrest me,” which is a quotation from Mildred Loving. And if you drop to the footnote then it gives you more about that—where Mildred was raised, there was an ingrained history of choosing to identify as anything other than Black. So now, from the beginning of the poem it becomes really complicated, right? I would probably read the blackout on its own first and then circle back and get this other complicated part of the history, which is how Mildred chose to identify. But that choice, as the second footnote brings out, was based on ease of living and what everybody in that town also did.

So, everything is nuanced. Everything is complicated. I wanted the poem to be there but I wanted all these other annotations and footnotes to be there to guide the reader through the complications. So, it’s not just Black and white, but I wanted a way to interact where all the complications could live, where you could still enjoy the poem, but also a new way to introduce the complications.

Rumpus: Writing yourself and your story into the gaps of legislation brings a hyper-personal lens of who is impacted by laws and governance. How did the poem “Within the Prohibited Degree” come to be?

Ward: That poem started as notes and other documents and snippets from documents I didn’t use for an entire poem, but they stuck with me for various reasons. So, it was after “Concerning a Problem” when I noted, “Oh, yeah, annotation is a kind of neat way to interact with some of this information.”

So, for “Within the Prohibited Degree,” I took some of those snippets and other documents and found a new way to interact with them, and then intentionally changed the order of a couple things so that you have to interact with the poem differently—almost like a flow chart, but you are being redirected. These are obstructive thoughts, many of them, and they’re obstructive ideals and I wanted to obstruct the reader’s experience in reading it and redirect them and make them feel a little uncomfortable as they go back and forth.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about ekphrasis for a second. How does ekphrasis create connection between us and them? Something in you sees a work and needs to respond to it—it becomes part of you. 

Ward: It causes me to think more deeply about what the work sparks in me. So, some of that ekphrasis is responding to pictures of my parents. Some of it is responding to Romare Bearden’s work and thinking about the great migration and how this has affected Blackness and Black thought. It does create a connection because I have to meditate and put myself in a new perspective in order to really write about the work and what the work causes in me.

Rumpus: I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up “Mural of This Country” with its mirroring poem of seven tercets and two quatrains in conversation with the word map on the opposite page, jumbling the same words and re-orienting them into a map of the United States. Can you walk me through your process of bringing together that poem of two pages speaking to each other?

Ward: I got into research mode on Romare Bearden. I was going to pitch to one of our organizations in Charlotte a booklet that went along with the exhibit for his work. In the process of pitching that, I wrote out all these words and I wrote short poems for every one. The pitch didn’t happen. But as I started sitting with the poems, I thought, “I’m going to create a poem that’s collaged from all these individual poems that are homages to these individual works of Romare.”

As I looked at it, I thought, “Oh, man, I think I could cull this so it works backwards, which I did as commission work for Blumenthal Performing Arts a few years ago. Once that existed, I probably re-edited that and it was after the conversation with Tyehimba where he said push everything, I said, “I wonder if this could be done.” Because the way I had it before, it would just reverse itself like a palindrome. I had to play with it and cut the word count so I could get it onto one page so that it could mirror the other page. And then I worked with a graphic artist to make it fit into the shape of the United States. So, that was a pretty satisfying moment when it actually worked.

 

 

 

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Author photo courtesy of author

When Craft Becomes an Act of Love: An Interview with Gayle Brandeis

Gayle Brandeis is glowing on my screen, talking about the body’s part in her creative process. That same morning, she and her friend, Rebecca Evans, led a class called “Musings and Movement,” where participants were encouraged to wear comfortable clothes and “have something to write with, and something to write on.” This made me think of Brandeis’s new essay collection, Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss (Overcup Press, 2023), which is a celebration of the things we are taught to keep hidden, especially our bodies. Movement and dance have always been a big part of Brandeis’s creative process: “I listen to that part of me that wants to move, wants to write,” she says. “It leads me into an intense place of focus.”

This focus has served Brandeis well. Writing across genres, Brandeis is a prolific author, respected teacher, and beloved mentor. Her nonfiction books include a hybrid memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (Beacon Press, 2017), and Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (Harper One, 2004). Her novels include The Book of Dead Birds (Harper Collins, 2009), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt, 2010), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award. Her recent novelette in poems was the terrifying Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus (A Testimony) (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), which was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. My personal favorite—maybe because it contains one of my favorite poems, “Jacaranda”—is her poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press, 2017).

Drawing Breath is Brandeis’s newest offering: a collection of personal essays examining our breath and breathing from different perspectives. From birth to adulthood, Brandeis’s life, loves, losses, and tales of writing about it have been ordered into sections (Eupnea: Quiet Breathing; Hyperaeration: Increased lung volume; Ponopnea: Painful Breathing . . . ). Fluctuating from humorous to horrifying, the essays are honest depictions of what haunts us, helps us, and heals us. A couple of the essays originally appeared in The Rumpus, including, “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” published in 2012, a groundbreaking essay for Brandeis. It was the first time she had published anything about her mother’s suicide, and the supportive response she received was instrumental in giving her the courage to write other essays about her mother, and, ultimately, her memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis—a book that changed my life.

Brandeis and I exchanged a series of emails before our Zoom interview, where we reconnected and talked about Drawing Breath, the book’s examination of the grief and sadness associated with loss and trauma, the writing process, and this marvelous container we call our body.

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The Rumpus: Your collection of essays has been described as a love letter to your readers. Maggie Smith says, “This collection draws inspiration from form—form of the body and form on the page.” I completely agree. How did this collection come together? Did you breathe in the air of your world, and breathe out these essays?

Gayle Brandeis: I didn’t have this collection in mind as I wrote each essay—each had its own sense of urgency and wholeness within me. I get a bit of tunnel vision when I’m in the thick of an essay, and it feels like the only thing I’ll ever write; I don’t consciously think about how it connects with my other writing, or how it could be part of a larger body of work (though my process is always evolving; perhaps someday I’ll write an essay collection with the bigger picture in mind along the way.) At some point, I realized I had more than enough essays to pull into a collection, and as I sifted through my files, I could see the underground rivers that flowed between them, the subconscious threads that stitched my work together. These essays were written over the course of more than twenty years, and I clearly have a stubborn devotion to subjects I keep returning to in my work, including breath, which became a meaningful organizing principle for the book.

Rumpus: You write: “The word ‘essay’ shares the same root as ‘assay,’ a verb used in metallurgy, chemistry, alchemy, meaning to test or weigh a substance to determine its composition. I think back to childhood collections, my intuitive groupings of pebble and shell. I similarly tested and weighed these essays as I put this collection together, tracing their origins of heat and grief and heart.” Your scientific curiosity, combined with an unflinching nerve, is beautiful alchemy. How did you find the perfect balance of science and heart?

Brandeis: Roxane Gay gave a guest lecture at Antioch several years ago called “In & Out” that was such a revelation to me in this regard—she spoke about the importance of looking both inward and outward when we write creative nonfiction; that’s where the alchemy happens, she said. It later occurred to me that I had being looking both directions in some of my work without articulating it as such, starting with the title essay, “Drawing Breath,” that’s divided into Inhales, where I look inward toward my own experience with breath, and Exhales, where I look outward toward the literature and science of breath. Her talk inspired me to continue to try to find this balance, to look both directions in a way that can both ground my work on an embodied level and make it more intellectually capacious (of course I don’t always find the ideal balance.)

Rumpus: The subtitle of the book is Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. This really is a book about writing through our lives, isn’t it, and writing about the body?

Brandeis: Yes! It has been a lifelong interest of mine, the connection between writing and the body, a connection that really came into focus for me in college, where I created a degree in Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation, and Healing. Dance and writing are both forms of expression, both forms of language that spring from and find interconnection in the body. Looking back, as I do in my essay, “Portrait of the Writer as a Young Girl,” I realized that when I was a kid, I was already writing about things like mental and physical illness. Things I still write about today. So, writing the body has clearly interested me since I started writing. It’s one of my most long-standing devotions.

Rumpus: “Portrait of the Writer as a Young Girl” is also haunted by the desire to be seen, to be known—a setting that feels both sad and familiar. How did your emotional neglect (like so many of us) feed the desire to create art?

Brandeis: I should preface this by saying I had a wondrous childhood, overall, and certainly a privileged one. My sister and I had a lot of freedom to play, to roam, to explore, to create, and we were exposed to art and culture and other enrichment, all of which I’m so grateful for.

At the same time, I recognize the deep wound I carry from having a narcissistic mother who instilled a lot of shame and guilt—sadness, too—in me when I was a child, and made it hard for me to express some of my deepest, truest thoughts and feelings. Writing was (and continues to be) a place where I could give those deepest, truest thoughts and feelings a voice, where I could truly be seen and heard, even if only to myself. It feels like an act of both resistance and joy that I’ve built a life around writing, around the place where I’ve felt most free.

Rumpus: “Drawing Breath” is a shaped essay that explains the desire for cohesion, as a person, as an artist, as a female, as a mother. What was the inspiration to craft the essay into (seemingly) hour-glass and bee-hive shapes?

Brandeis: I have to give credit for the visual shape of this essay to Jenny Kimura, who designed the inside of Drawing Breath. She had the idea to shape the essay so that it expanded and contracted like inhales and exhales, and I was delighted by this idea, by how the text breathes on the page, thanks to her genius. This essay is one of the older ones in the book—I wrote it over twenty years ago as my critical paper when I was getting my MFA at Antioch. I was fascinated by the connection between breath and writing, and am grateful I had an opportunity to explore that connection in such a deep way through the critical paper component of the degree (and am grateful to my amazing mentor Alma Luz Villanueva, who supported my unconventional approach.) I love that this essay has new life all these years later, and in its beautiful new shape gifted by Jenny.

Rumpus: The language in “Thunder, Thighs” is informed by a research questionnaire you made for women participants, one for a project about the cultural history of the thigh! It includes various sources: ancient texts,  the Indo-European etymology of the word “teu,” a diet booklet from 1953, and even Mad Magazine. Are these sources, from the serious to the flimsy pulp of pop culture, complicit in shaming of women in their bodies?

Brandeis: Most of the sources in this essay are indeed complicit in the shaming of our bodies, other than the sources that celebrate our bodies, like the ancient Egyptian prayer for abundant thighs. The advertising industry, the diet industry, etc., are arms of the patriarchy and capitalism and white supremacy, which all benefit from making many of us feel bad about ourselves. There’s always a product or service we can buy to try to fit unrealistic beauty standards—products and services that keep us from loving ourselves as we are. I’m glad the piece made you laugh as well as cry—I’m a pretty silly person, but I tend to skew towards seriousness in my writing, and I’m happy when some of my humor finds its way into my work.

Rumpus: “The Women Who Helped” is an incredible essay, all about an assault you had to endure. You address the power in the supportive sisterhood that helped you afterward. What was it like to revisit this trauma, including what you call “the most important part” of the ordeal?

Brandeis: The way the women in my dorm supported and nurtured me after that experience of assault was life changing. I’d always had small groups of friends growing up, usually just one or two friends I was close to at any given time, and I hadn’t experienced being part of a larger circle of women until that moment. My mother was distrustful of other women, competitive with other women, so I didn’t have the model of communal sisterhood growing up (though I had the most beautiful and profound direct experience of sisterhood with my own sister.) The #MeToo movement prodded me to take a fresh look at many experiences of my life, and I was startled to realize how when I’d told the story of this assault over the years, I’d completely left out the women who’d helped me afterward.

Writing this essay felt like an act of repair, of honoring, of healing. I was able to read it publicly during a college reunion (or “renewal” as the alternative program I was part of calls them) and found myself literally embraced by a circle of women after I read, some of whom had been part of that original circle, all of us crying and hugging each other, holding each other up.

Rumpus: The collective ‘we’ in “We Too” is mega-powerful and a masterpiece in language. Peppered with science, it is a fabulous, factual romp into our power. You end with the encouragement to “find our wider voice.” How did this essay evolve?

Brandeis: I wrote this essay around the time my novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns, was released. When I started writing that book back in 2009, it came to me in first person plural, a collective voice for the girls and women allegedly murdered by Countess Bathory around the turn of the seventeenth century. The only work I had read in first-person plural at that point was The Ladies Auxiliary, by Tova Mirvis, about ten years prior; I remember finding it really energizing and inspiring—it likely helped me find the collective voice in my work. I ended up setting Many Restless Concerns aside for many years—I was pregnant in 2009, and writing about torture and murder felt unsavory in that condition. Then my mom took her own life a week after the baby was born, and that was what I needed to write about over the next few years. I only returned to Many Restless Concerns after I finished writing my memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis—I felt ready to write about a grief bigger than my own, ready to access a voice bigger than my own. In the intervening years, several other books and shorter pieces had been published in the first-person plural—it became a bit of a hot craft choice, in fact—and I thought it would be interesting to investigate what the point of view could accomplish on the page, especially for women-identifying writers. It made sense to write the essay itself in first-person plural, and it became a fun choral experience, merging my voice into a collective voice made of other collective voices.

Rumpus: Of all the essays, I enjoyed “Joy” the most! It was your mother’s fragrance, and the sense memory seems to match the relationship you had with her. The fragrance of the essay transcends language and lingers long after the last words (the haunting “Don’t Go Don’t Go Don’t Go,” repeated over and over by a little girl chasing her parents to the elevator). Why is smell so important to memory? Important to recognize as a trigger for an emotional response?

Brandeis: Thank you so much for these beautiful words! To get a little science nerdy here, smell is deeply entwined with memory and emotion because it accesses the same area of the brain—it bypasses the thalamus, which processes all our other senses, and goes straight to the primary olfactory cortex, near our limbic system, hippocampus, and amygdala, the parts that process memory and emotion. That can make scent such a powerful trigger, and the scent of my mom’s perfume (even just the memory of that scent) certainly causes our whole relationship to well up inside me, which made this essay both challenging and meaningful to write (it was also challenging because scent can be difficult to pin down with language, since it’s so evanescent—a word I just realized has the word “scent” embedded inside it, which feels so fitting!)

Rumpus: “Self Interview” was the essay that made me fist pump the air! It’s a post-memoir interview that reminds me how important it is to write our family stories, and how life changes after we write them! How has Gayle Brandeis, post-memoir, dealt with the sneaky grief that lingered after that cathartic book was written? After this one was written?

Brandeis: I asked myself the same question—“How did writing your memoir change you?”—so many times because I realized I could give many different answers. Writing The Art of Misdiagnosis profoundly changed me in some ways and also didn’t change me at all in others, and I wanted to try to capture that contradiction, that gamut. As for how I’ve dealt with that sneaky grief—such a powerful question!—that seems to differ from time to time. Sometimes grief still catches me off guard and feels like it will strangle me, and other times it arrives more like a soft cloud, a gentle passing pang. I guess I’ve gotten better at knowing grief will pass, even when it feels violent. I try to sit with it and feel it and breathe my way through it as best I can until it subsides. Enough time has passed that appreciation comes on the wake of grief now, and I can feel grateful for all I shared with the ones I lost instead of just feeling the ache of that loss. I’m thankful to be able to access that sweetness.

Rumpus: “My Shadow Son” was fascinating! I wrote, “Maybe this is a book itself?” I the margin. How does this essay speak to grief and the body for you? What was the reason for including it here?

Brandeis: It’s cool that you could see “My Shadow Son” as its own book; I had considered expanding this story into a book project after I wrote the essay, and was really excited by the idea—there’s so much more I could explore, and this is the most viral essay I’ve ever written, so there’s clearly interest out there—but the man who thought I was his biological mother for so many years (and has since become a friend) was worried any further digging would be difficult for his family, so I’ve let the idea go. I decided to include the essay because I felt it fit the type of breath I was exploring in that section of the book (Orthopnea: Breathlessness in Lying Down Position Relieved by Sitting Up or Standing). The essays in this section look at moments of relief after difficulty, and being able to find my shadow son’s real biological mother proved to be such a relief for both him and myself.

He had been pouring so much pain and grief and anger towards me because he thought I was denying him connection to his roots, to his true story. It was painful for me to carry all his grief on top of my own. Once we could let go of that grief between us, we could find real connection.

Rumpus: Another fascination was “Anniversary Gifts” an essay chronicling your separation from and reunification with your husband. The grief that caused havoc in your marriage proved to be a lousy, impermanent substance compared to the titanium of your union. What does this say about the stubbornness of life? Like the cover of your book: roots cut and blossoming, despite their death sentence.

Brandeis: I love the phrase, “the stubbornness of life” (and love the connection you found with the book cover!) Life is so beautifully stubborn, indeed, and I’m grateful that my marriage proved to be beautifully stubborn, even after I selfishly blew it apart. The love was clearly still there, underneath all the resentment between us and the chaos I had wrought, patiently waiting for us to acknowledge it and nurture it back to life. I love that our marriage grew back sturdier than ever, and love that we both cultivate it mindfully now. We both know how lucky we are to have this second chance, and we want to do whatever we can to help our marriage, and one another, thrive.

Rumpus: You’ve said that when you start writing, “It’s like this is the only piece I’ll ever write, the only piece I’ve ever written.” Can you talk about that?

Brandeis: When I write something that’s meaningful to me, it tends to pull me into a hyper-present state. I get into a zone and get hyper-focused. I try to come to my writing fresh each time and give all of myself to the piece in front of me—body, mind, heart, soul. All of my energy is focused on the point of the cursor as it moves forward. There’s a place within me where the work comes from, and everything else blurs and falls away. Of course, I get distracted by my own thoughts and worries sometimes, but it’s a desire of mine to be as fully present as I can be.

I try to do this in other areas of my life as well—to be as present as possible with what is in front of me—even though I may not be able to do this one hundred percent of the time. I want to be fully present for whatever I’m doing, whether it’s teaching, or writing, or being with people I love.

Rumpus: Is this a discipline that you’ve learned through the years?

Brandeis: I’m a pretty undisciplined person. It’s kind of amazing I get as much done as I do! I’m always really happy to hear about writers who have specific disciplines, and specific schedules for their writing. I’m not like that at all. But somehow my various practices, as unruly as they are in my life, have always naturally taken me to a good, focused place.

I was a dancer and figure skater when I was young. I would learn these routines in my figure skating, but then, when it was time to compete or perform in a skating show, those routines would fall away, and I would let the music move me. I would improvise, much to the chagrin of my coaches. So, there’s always been this stubborn part of me that is following its own creative impulses. That part of me wants to move or wants to write without rules or routines. I get to that intense place of focus, and from there, it’s just a matter of listening to what needs to come through me at the moment. Once I tap into that, it kind of pulls me forward.

Rumpus: Your work is marvelously relatable. Do you focus on connecting with the reader?

Brandeis: I think that happens in revision. With writing, it helps to think no one’s ever going to read it, so I’m not holding myself back. When I revise, it’s very much focused on connection with the reader. I want to make sure what I’m writing will make sense to other people. I want people to be able to feel it in their bodies.

That early draft is really me getting out of my own way and then, with each successive draft, it’s just to connect more and more with the reader. I want to make the work as clear as it can be, as potent as it can be, for others to take it in. It feels like a sacred relationship, the connection between writer and reader, and I want to honor that through craft as well as through love. When it’s in service to that connection, craft becomes an act of love.

 

 

 

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Author photo by Asher Brandeis

This Is All the Time We Get: A Conversation with Felicia Chiao

Felicia Chiao was working as an industrial designer at IDEO when A24 reached out and told her that Daniel Kwan, director of their highest-grossing film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, wanted to collaborate. The project was not a movie, but one of two picture books that Kwan had written (24 Minutes to Bedtime and I’ll Get to the Bottom of This), to be published by A24 as part of their expansion into children’s literature. Neither Kwan, Chiao, nor A24 had gone through the process of publishing a picture book from start to finish, which is perhaps why the final product is so strange and delightful.

Much in the way that Everything Everywhere All At Once layers dimensions in the multiverse, 24 Minutes to Bedtime layers dimensions of time. Each set of facing pages counts one minute closer to Winston’s eight o’clock bedtime. “Why can’t we stay up later?” he mourns, to which his dad answers, “Because . . . this is all the time you get.” With the help of a time machine, Winston fills every minute with chaos, as four different versions of him time-jump between pages, running from the inevitable. Chiao embedded mini storylines throughout the illustrations, and readers can choose to follow any of the Winstons, countless hidden easter eggs, or his frazzled parents. As Winston tries to slow the minutes, his parents wish they could fast forward. When he finally falls asleep in their arms though, they realize that truly, this is all the time they get.

Chiao has been drawing since she was a child, and thought of it not as a profession, but as a coping mechanism. Struggling to express her feelings, she drew in notebook after notebook through her school years and beyond. She began sharing her drawings on Instagram, but her account didn’t take off until the pandemic. When lockdowns began, she steadily gained an audience, and now has a following of over half a million. At the beginning of 2022, she left her job to become a full-time illustrator. On a phone call from Texas where she was visiting family for the holidays, she spoke with me about being part of this inexperienced yet brilliant team, working with Daniel Kwan, her own artistic process, and how her mental health has both shaped her work and transformed within it.

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The Rumpus: Looking at your body of work, one of the things I notice is the dreamy state it creates. There’s a sense of both mundanity and magic, a melancholy about the passage of time, but also humor and joy. Your art seems like a perfect fit for something that Daniel Kwan would write. How did this partnership come along?

Felicia Chiao: A24 had a list of people they were interested in working with, and Daniel had his own list. It seems I was on both, so they reached out to me. I knew A24 as the movie house, but I didn’t know anything about publishing or children’s books, and they didn’t really have a clear idea of how it was going to be done either, so it was new for all of us.

Rumpus: Traditionally, a children’s book author and illustrator might work separately, but it seems there was so much integration between the text and the images. Did you and Daniel work closely together on these things, or follow a more traditional model?

Chiao: I originally anticipated the more traditional model. I thought they were going to give me a storyboard and I was going to translate it into my style. But on one of the very first calls with everyone, they said, “We don’t know what we want the characters to look like or how we want anything done,” and they turned to me and asked, “Do you want to help us figure that out?” This wasn’t what I signed up for originally, but I’m glad it turned out that way because it gave me a lot more freedom.

Rumpus: As I was reading the book, I was thinking the family looked a bit like Daniel’s.

Chiao: I hadn’t actually seen a picture of his kid until later in the process, but, you know, every Asian child has that bowl cut. Originally, I’d drawn the dad as a bald man with a mustache, very stereotypical, and the mom with her hair up in a bun. They said, “Actually, we’re aiming for the A24 audience now—Millennials becoming parents—so the dad can be a little more hip.” I realized both dads on the video call were wearing beanies and had long hair, so I thought, “Well, I’ll take from life.”

Rumpus: What was the creative process of working with Daniel like?

Chiao: We would go through his stick figure storyboard online together and try to catch all the errors, because it’s a very complex book with connecting lines in different chronological orders. So there was a lot of conversation, a lot of back and forth. For example, triple-checking that the pajamas matched up on the right page, and that what each version of the character was talking about made sense in the time jumps. I didn’t really understand this book until I had to draw every single page.

It was also an interesting process because I work traditionally. I don’t do anything digital really. For a book, especially with the repeating imagery of this one, we had to tailor it to fit my process. I was able to make a few drawings and scan them, then I would Photoshop in the different elements and characters and move around the speech bubbles that I hand-lettered.

It was a very strange process because of the way we all work—the A24 team versus Daniel, versus my abilities and the tools I had—to make this book come to life. We thought we would be done in June or March of this year and we finished maybe August or September. It all started in November last year, before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out.

Rumpus: The book reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once in the way it plays with time and dimension, and how there are so many threads to track. I imagine it was a challenge to illustrate.

Chiao: Yeah, I was having a really hard time in the beginning figuring out the book. Then when I went to the screening and saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, all of it clicked. Suddenly, it made a lot of sense. I got what he wanted, and what he was doing creatively. After that, it made the book a little easier.

Rumpus: I can see how that would happen. Artists are often preoccupied with getting at deeper truths around the same themes, and there were many that crossed over between this book and the film.

Chiao: Yeah, there was that vibe of nothing matters, do what you want, but everything actually matters so much. Wrestling with that idea was inspiring. A lot of times, I think artists are paralyzed by the fear of making something bad, so they procrastinate or don’t start a piece at all. When I first started concepting the house and the characters for the book, I spent so much time agonizing over small details. I drew several versions of Clarence, the stuffed rabbit, and nothing felt quite right. Eventually I just said “fuck it” and made what we called “long Clarence.” Did the shape really matter in terms of the story? No. But giving the stuffed toy an irregular shape added to the overall vibe of the story.

Do what you can or want and have fun with it; you’ll be surprised how much impact something you’ve made can have on other people when you’re not stressing about how to do it the “best” way. I’m so used to consultancy life where you just deliver what you think the client wants. And Daniel is such a big proponent of saying, “Well, what do you think? What do you want to do? What’s interesting to you? Let’s make it happen.” It was a really lovely reminder that I’m going to enjoy the work more if I do what I think is best. They hired me for my work, so I should be able to push my ideas a little bit stronger.

Rumpus: The subtitle of the book is “a 4-dimensional bedtime story,” and its nonlinear nature invites the reader to revisit it again and again, even more than the usual return to a children’s book, because you can read it differently each time. You did such a wonderful job of creating these layered reads and offering something new to discover with each one.

Chiao: Well, thanks. In my drawings that are interiors, I always love adding little details and objects all around the page. I think it gets people to look at your work a lot longer, especially in the time of social media where you stare at something for three seconds and keep scrolling. People tell me that they stop and zoom in, and they look for all the pieces. When you spend twenty to thirty hours on a drawing, you want people to look at it.

Growing up, I loved Richard Scarry. He had a book about vehicles and all I remember is looking for gold bugs on all the pages. I don’t remember the story. I don’t remember the rest of the book. I just remember every night I would go look for the bug even though I knew where it was already. So, I like the idea of a kid being able to enjoy little elements of the illustration and the art, even if they’re not reading per se.

Rumpus: Can you tell me more about your influences? For this book but also for your work in general?

Chiao: I didn’t use too much for this project besides the vague nostalgia of the books I grew up on. I knew this wasn’t about reading a book front to back like adults do. It’s more of a journey. I knew whatever Daniel was coming up with probably wasn’t going to be a standard children’s book, and I didn’t want to have that gut feeling where I’d be thinking, well, that’s not how it’s done. I also felt that if I looked at a stack of children’s books now, it would influence me too much in a way that isn’t authentic to my style, which is kind of how I handle life, too.

I don’t like looking at too many artists or illustrators because I don’t want to inadvertently copy what they’re doing. A lot of my work is inspired through film and music and the world around. If a song I like has a strong emotion in it, I try to go off that feeling. I want to portray that in my illustrations. My biggest inspiration, I think, is the artistic process itself. I like making things, so how I feel while I’m making it, that’s what translates into the drawing.

Rumpus: I was sharing your work with a writer friend, and she remarked on how every image felt like being dropped into the middle of a story. When you create your own art, does it stem from a larger narrative playing out in your mind?

Chiao: I think I’m very lucky that there’s a storytelling aspect people can connect with, because that isn’t done on purpose. Images show up in my head. Then there’s a queue in my brain of what drawings I’m going to do next, and they stack up until I can get them out. A lot of times, it’s because I love the materials I use, which are alcohol-based markers and pens. I’m dabbling a bit with watercolor now. I know my tools well though. So I’ll think, “Oh, I wonder if I can make colors a certain way,” or “I want to draw this rounder shape,” and it’s just purely selfish. It’s the idea of, oh, I really want to draw a certain shape or certain lighting, or maybe sometimes when things are chaotic, I want to draw one point perspective interiors, because grids and perspective have rules.

Rumpus: It makes so much sense to me that during the pandemic, everyone found your work. The sentiments that I either read in your captions or find in your images signal that here is an artist who really has her finger on the pulse of what we’re all going through.

Chiao: It’s a little sad because I’ve been drawing the figure alone in interiors for a long time, and when the lockdown happened, my work blew up. I recognized, “Oh, suddenly everyone’s depressed at the same time.”

I think because I’ve had mental illnesses for a very long time; it’s not something I’m actively fighting against anymore. A lot of my work is about exploring what it’s like to live with it. There are still good days and then you’re having a bad day, and they’re both equally right. The little blob creature I draw that a lot of people seem to like is mostly anxiety. It’s a mix of things, but it used to be within the figure’s body impacting it. Now it hangs around in the house like a cat as a companion. People have interpreted it 100 different ways. I don’t actually know what’s right, because I’m not thinking too hard about what the drawing means. I do a drawing a week. So I’m glad people are finding meaning in it because sometimes I just want to draw a grid. I’ll put up a drawing that was done purely for technical reasons, and people will comment, “Oh my God, I feel this.” And I’m so curious: What are you feeling?

Rumpus: That’s part of what’s beautiful about your work. You leave space for the viewer to fill it with what they need. I noticed in 24 Minutes to Bedtime that there are multiple pages with illustrations and no words. In the beginning there’s an empty landscape, then the frame of the house being built, which I really only appreciated after I’d gotten to the last pages where you see the decay of the house. It was such a poignant way to show that this is all the time we have and it’s so fleeting. Was having these images without text part of the plan from the beginning?

Chiao: That was all Daniel [Kwan]. You just described exactly what he wanted people to feel. I’m so glad that came across because at first we knew we wanted the beginning scenes of the field and then the house showing up, but I did question the ending because I thought it looks like they’ve all died. We decided to stick with it though, because the story is talking about the passage of time. Even though the parents are so stressed and so tired, they recognize that this is all the time we get. Even if in the moment it doesn’t seem like the best thing ever, we have to appreciate this time.

I didn’t exactly have “this is all the time we get” in my mind before this project, but I had a similar thought in my work about “maybe this is all there is.” It’s the idea that so many of us are waiting for things to work out, for the next big experience or memory to define life by, but maybe life is really just about appreciating the day-to-day ups and downs that make up the majority of our lives. Stuff that seems simple now may carry a lot of nostalgia later, and I think the best we can do is to be grateful that we get to experience it all.

Daniel came at it from a film perspective of having opening shots and closing shots, and the text that comes in like credits. So it’s also been interesting working on a book with someone who normally does movies, because the vision is not what we’re used to seeing in books.

Rumpus: It feels full circle that you aren’t influenced necessarily by specific illustrators, but by film and by music. This partnership between the two of you seems like such a great fit for that reason as well.

Chiao: I still can’t believe it happened. I’m glad it’s done but I’m so appreciative of the opportunity because I don’t regularly freelance, which has been good and bad. It’s like a rubber band. It was stretched out when I was working for other people. Now I purely do only what I want to do. With freelance, I have to give up a little bit of control, but this was one of the first times genuinely working with another creative person that has expanded my idea of what good work is and how I want to work.

 

 

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Self-portrait by author

A Kind of Common Madness: A Conversation with Liz Harmer

Destructive desire, a brother so psychically contaminated by his twin sister’s sexual life it’s as though her actions are his, a mother who inflames the mutual enmity between her children, social codes as rigid as they are ambiguous: Strange Loops, the second novel by Canadian author Liz Harmer, has the intensity and drive of classic tragedy. The book opens with the main character, Francine—a thirty-three-year-old mother of two, a wife and teacher pursuing a PhD—having an illicit affair with a former student who just turned eighteen. From there, her life unravels with inevitability so fixed it feels damned, as she casts back to the events that led her to this point. Strange Loops offers a complex, ethically tangled engagement with the reckonings of “me-too.”

Harmer is also a widely published, internationally award-winning essayist and poet, writing about madness, motherhood, religion, and obsession. Her debut novel, The Amateurs, was a finalist for the Amazon First Book Award and has been optioned by Riddle Films. I love her bold, intimate work for how it combines an interest in overwhelming, seemingly unassimilable passions with the intellectual effort to make sense of them.

We have been friends for a decade and spoke over Zoom about tragedy, taboo, unmediated experience, and how we perceive the sexuality of teenage girls.

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The Rumpus: Strange Loops explores the relationship between desire and subjectivity. What interests you about this subject?

Liz Harmer: Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession. I emerged from the hospital at eighteen, and by twenty-two I was married to my first love. These things, of course, formed me, and I’m glad for both. But, for me, the feeling that Anne Carson describes in Eros the Bittersweet—that erotic love can feel like you are finally connecting with the truest truth there is, peering straight down into time, finally seeing clearly—is a kind of common madness. What interested me is how much these peak experiences lead us to compose ourselves, invent a reality to suit the new situation, and also, can cause us to do great harm. When we think we are seeing most clearly, we see most poorly.

 

Rumpus: You’ve said that Loops might be a polarizing novel. Why do you say that?

 Harmer: One concern I have is that it indulges a kind of melodrama. It’s unapologetically melodramatic and larger than life in a way that is not cool. Part of me worries about that being off-putting or seeming unintentional. I’ve also had a few reactions from people in workshops that made me believe we’re pretty confused about what we think a protagonist means. Is a protagonist the endorsement of the author? This character, Francine, who I’m obviously very interested in and fond of, and who is difficult, fascinating, and intense, is making very poor moral decisions and missing something crucial about her own life. But my answer to the problem of likeability has always been that what’s “likeable” isn’t the same as what’s nice or palatable. That what we—what I—really crave is a protagonist that surprises me. 

Rumpus: We think of our culture here in the contemporary West as “permissive” but within the first few pages of Loops you approach the limits of what is permissible and take us into our taboos. What draws you to the forbidden?

Harmer: Yes, we are permissive about some things, and punitive about others, and my long training in the religious community that raised me, also raised me to ask why. As a teenager, I was constantly demanding that my elders tell me exactly why and for what theological reason sex outside of marriage was wrong. Here it says that Jesus will forgive us anything, that we can’t help sinning (even a lustful thought is as bad as adultery), and here it says we shouldn’t get married, and here are a bunch of God’s favorite adulterers. So, I am in the habit of looking at the rules and taboos and trying to ask what their basis is.

When I started to present parts of this novel in workshop, people had very different reactions to the content. One person told me she would never read a novel about a woman taking advantage of a student like this—it was too far (and I understood this, because I found Lolita mostly painful to read)—and then an older man who read it seemed to see that Francine at seventeen trying to seduce her thirty-something youth pastor was in total control. He said the man “didn’t stand a chance.” To me, both of these reactions were revealing. Our taboos and our reactions to the crossing of those taboos shows us something about our deepest beliefs about gender, about sex, about power, etc.

Rumpus: When you said people might find this “not cool,” I wondered, what’s “cool”?

Harmer: Maybe detached, ironic? There’s very little opportunity to have distance in this novel. But I’ve always been interested in the idea that there might be some experiences that are unmediated. This could mean being overwhelmed by art or the sublime; it could mean an experience of madness where you’re approaching something that you can no longer think through fast enough to mediate. Not wanting to have a persona, wanting to be a self that’s really there—this is an old-fashioned desire.

Rumpus: How do you get at unmediated experience in a medium?

Harmer: This is the puzzle I was facing. When I wrote this, I was writing in such a way that I was trying to access something I wasn’t intellectually in control of, which is the closest you can get in a medium to getting at something unmediated. I think I was trying to do something like automatic writing. I was trying to be guided by something that wasn’t clear to me and then in the editing process, to fix it up. I want this novel to feel like there’s less of a gap between the thing and the comprehension of the thing.

Rumpus: Can you talk about the structure you chose?

Harmer: In the first pass I was conjuring feelings and figuring out what was happening. But then when I went back, at a certain point I realized that the novel had three separate time periods and two separate narrative centers and was jumping between loops. I took each section, I made this nerdy infographic where I figured out the number of pages that were devoted to each loop, and tried to balance them out more. There’s a seventeen-years-ago loop where young Francine is having an affair with an older pastor, a present loop where she’s having an affair with her former student, and a section from in-between, where Francine’s family gathers at their country home and have a catastrophic fight during a tornado. At some point, I realized that while the first two loops drove the plot forward to its conclusion, the third didn’t. Instead, the energy of that section is like a tornado—it spirals down in. It doesn’t go forward—it goes deep. This was a very pleasing discovery to me. I placed the tornado loop in the mathematical centre of the novel, which felt like a sinkhole into which all the other events are tumbling. It’s very pleasing to me when the structure of a novel can reflect its themes and content.

Rumpus: Why is it pleasing when form and content mirror each other?

Harmer: Maybe it gets at a very deep pleasure of containment, like being swaddled. Maybe it’s like having a body instead of floating off into space.

My grade three teacher for some reason let me put on plays and cast all my classmates in them. The first play I put on was an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. When we got to the final scene, all the actors were so excited to be acting that we just kept going with no script. Eventually the teacher had to stop us and say this is enough. I think about this moment a lot. You just want to keep playing, you want to give your characters more things to say and do, but then you lose the thread completely and there’s no coherent story. I’ve written six novels and published two. The difference between a novel I can finish and one I can’t finish is the presence or absence of a shapely “container,” I call it. 

Rumpus: I’ve often thought that we give teenage boys the grace of seeing their sexual advances and expressions as awkward or messy. With girls, we tend to give them this first-degree level of intention when it comes to their sexuality. Of course, teenagers want to be seen as sexual beings, but I think we see girls as more controlled than they are. When young Francine pursues an older authority figure, how responsible is she for this relationship? 

Harmer: Francine is this very gifted young person who wants to think she’s in control and older than she is and is treated as though she’s older, which was also my experience as a kid. I think it’s a damaging thing we do to girls. We’re provoked by their sexuality and then our provocation is ascribed to them.

As a teenager, Francine takes this epic pilgrimage to throw herself at this older pastor. She’s determined to go down this path. But there are moments here, which, to me, are the saddest, darkest parts of the novel, where she’s alone in this house with him, trying to conjure up the feeling of wanting to throw herself into this thing, but she starts to feel afraid. Afterwards, she’s shaken up. She goes home weeping, and she thinks it’s because she’s in love. But I think there’s more going on there. This is Francine putting herself in a vulnerable position and then trying to be strong enough to withstand what has hurt her. She wants to see herself as older than her years, and the adults in her life also want to see her that way because then they don’t need to be responsible for her. She’s left to believe that she did this to herself and to this older man. She believes he was a victim to her desire.

Rumpus: Then Francine is the older teacher having an affair with a recent student. Were you thinking of trauma and its repetitions? 

Harmer: I wasn’t thinking about it at all because I was trying to write in this immediate way. Later, I discovered that she believes she had been the villain when she was young, and her re-enactment is clearly an attempt to understand what motivated the pastor. So yes, unconsciously on my part and on Francine’s part, this is about trauma, but I wasn’t trying to offer a clear explanation for her behaviour.

I went through something traumatic when I was young and I didn’t acknowledge this to myself until about two years ago. I was so unwilling to accept that I wasn’t in control of what had happened to me and to see that I had been damaged by this experience that I was resistant to the idea of trauma. And I guess I was afraid to write a trauma plot because, you know, we’re “on the other side of the trauma plot.” But discovering that you have symptoms of PTSD twenty years after something happened and that for all that time you did not know that about yourself makes you ask: How many other things do I not understand about my own experience?

Rumpus: Is that what a “strange loop” is? 

Harmer: The title Strange Loops comes from this book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, which is a very tender piece of personal, philosophical writing because it’s about his wife’s death and the belief he came to about consciousness and how intermixed our minds are with others. When someone we know well dies, things you love about them live on in your consciousness. So, there’s a sense in which we humans create each other’s consciousnesses. We’re part of a complex system of feedback loops where we take something in, put it back out, etc., and that’s how you create a self. I was thinking about Strange Loops as about creation of a self through others. To me, the main strange loop in the book is between Francine and her twin brother, Philip. They’re so entangled with each other that it’s not clear where one ends and the other begins. They’re like the snake that eats its own tail, or like the staircase that seems like it’s going up but it’s going down. He can’t bear what she’s done as though it’s happened to him.

Rumpus: In a number of essays you’ve written about coming from a Dutch Calvinist Reformed background and the way this impacted your sexuality as a young person. Here you gave Francine and Philip a liberal, secular household. How were you thinking about this obsession with female sexuality but without those traditional overdeterminations?

Harmer: Well, the sections in the past, set during Francine and Philip’s teenage years, take place in the late ‘90s. Even outside of my own stultified, confused sexual education, which was extremely misogynist and sex-negative—the messages were “don’t get pregnant.” “don’t be a slut,” “just get married and go away”—I was thinking of people like Monica Lewinsky and how she had been defamed and villainized even though she was so young, and he was…the fucking president. Our whole cultural attitude at that time was misogynist in a way I hope has changed a little bit, for my own kids.

I felt very unsafe about sex as a young person because, talking about the responsibilities we give to girls, I felt like I was responsible for the effect I was having on other people. For me, one of the grand ironies of my sheltered childhood going to a Christian school was that in order to attend this very conservative school on the other side of the city, I had to take an hour of city buses through the heart of downtown Hamilton. I’d get off downtown and wait for my next bus in front of a strip club. Men were everywhere, and they all thought I was twenty, not fourteen. I had a lot of negative encounters. So, I had a confusing inside/outside perspective on sexuality.

I’d internalized some misogyny but was very interested in rebelling against that so was reading second wave feminism and stuff about sex positivity. I was trying to talk a big game about being open-minded about sex in a context that was completely unwilling to entertain that. I was annoying and provocative to everybody all the time. Even at seventeen, Francine is not coy about her sexuality, and I think it was an intellectual position for her. She is trying on an intellectual position, as I was at that age.

But I also have compassion for Philip. He’s desperate for a meaning greater than his own reality, he’s going through his existential crisis that we do as teens, and he becomes interested in religion as something that will give him that meaning. I made his parents secular, but in a sense, this is a devotion to atheism that I’ve always found similar to being Christian. Even though the family in this novel comes from a different cultural background than my own—they’re also from a higher class than I’m from—I actually feel that psychologically they’re very similar to the more dogmatic, conservative figures I’ve known so well.

Rumpus: The book feels boldly tragic. Is this bucking a trend or are there contemporary works that inspired you?

Harmer: Do you remember The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides? In the press for that I remember Eugenides saying the 19^th-century marriage plot no longer has force because domesticity is no longer a place of high stakes for, say, women. We have divorce laws. We have bank accounts. We can own property. But love and domesticity have been places in my own life of high drama and struggle. The minute I was facing my own divorce, I realized how much traditional gender roles had really infected my own life in ways both subtle and very obvious, and so The Marriage Plot inspired me only insofar as it irritated me.

After I wrote Loops I read Querelle of Roberval by Kevin Lambert (the English translation is by Donald Winkler), which is based on Greek tragedy. It’s written in a way that you don’t have anyone to root for, and instead of God or Fate being the inescapable problem that causes the problem for the individual, it’s capitalism. I’m very compelled by the idea that tragedy as a form offers us evidence that there are things beyond our control, yet that we must bear the terrible consequences of these forces we can’t do anything to subdue. This is coming from my deep Calvinist roots, but what tragedy offers is a reminder that you are not your own. A great modern piety is that we believe in our own agency and we believe in our own freedom and we believe that we can make rational decisions.

I think I’m drawn, in most of the art I love, to the kind of ordinary darkness that everyone experiences: that every one of us, no matter what we might aspire to, is capable of failing to do what’s right, and that failure, no matter how we might explain it to ourselves, no matter how sorry we might be, could have catastrophic consequences anyway. This to me feels like the tragedy of the human condition, and it also feels like the source of some of the most beautiful, terrifying stories people have made.

 

 

 

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Author photo by Scott Nichols